When Annie was little, she failed to walk over and over again. She would stumble and fall – a lot! We would actually applaud her when she fell and got back up to celebrate. Were we celebrating her failure? Was she actually failing? Not once did we think “Oh, she is never going to succeed.” Not once did we label her attempts as failure.
My language seems too casual to me. I know what I mean by failure, but do others? I wonder the same about my leaders, colleagues, and friends. Do we really want our learning environments to be safe havens for risk-taking and failure? Or do we want our spaces to promote rapid prototyping and iterative problem solving? Or both? Or something else?
Failure is not the right word for what I am trying to convey to learners. I prefer to think about learning, teaching and modeling persistence rather than failure. I strive to risk stumbling and falling and model getting back up to try again.
As we are learning, how public are we willing to make our risks? How do we support each other when there is a stumble?
When Annie was little, we supported her as she learned. When she took a spill, we comforted her and helped her persist. Actually, Annie is still little and continues to need us to celebrate her success in the midst of her mistakes and missteps. Isn’t this true of every learner?
I strive to continue to learn to persist in seeing and celebrating success.
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I used to have a drawing teacher who told me that drawing is ninety percent erasing.
Can you imagine learning something new without an eraser? (Or perhaps, more contemporarily, without a backspace button?)
Wonderful post.
My current needlework project has once again emphasized the need to rip things out and begin again. Mistakes in selecting threads, mistakes in the number of threads, mistakes in the color choices, are all difficult,but they are all valuable. Mistakes or missteps have allowed me to love the total project. Years ago I wanted someone to give me all the answers or keep me from making mistakes or missteps. Now I am grateful for the missteps, as I relish the corrections!
Thanks for your post!
I love this viewpoint and the mindset to encourage persistence, rather than seeing initial missteps as failures. A parent shared an article with me about this subject. It was about the Japanese schools’ outlook on failure. When children could not “get it” they were encouraged to persist until they were able to complete the task. Their teachers and classmates applauded their efforts, rather than belittling their inability to complete it quickly or be first or be “the best” as we often value in American culture. What a great mindset to teach our students!
Jill, you always model looking for bright spots and encourage that we see growth for what it is, knowing that some falls and missteps are bound to occur when something great is underway!